The Most Surprising Side Effect of Quitting Weed

Five months ago, in August, I decided I needed to change my life, and it was time to get my cannabis ingestion under control. There are a lot of reasons that I knew I had to quit. Some of those reasons included: we were moving to a state where it wasn’t fully legal, I wanted to try and get a ‘real’ job, I didn’t feel it was adding to my life anymore, and it felt like a vestigial crutch. There are others, and I’ll write about them in the future.

Those reasons would be important — because in order to keep going and not ingest meant I’d have to hold space for those reasons whenever the cravings got bad.

There was one side effect that surprised me, and that was that the entire time I was smoking and taking cannabis — I wasn’t dreaming. Or I wasn’t remembering the dreams. Whichever.

The reason it was surprising is that it had been so long since I hadn’t had cannabis regularly that I didn’t remember what truly vivid dreams, nightmares, and night terrors that I had. One of the reasons that I think I was taking it so frequently, subconsciously, was to deal with the horrible night terrors I get (I’ve talked quite a bit about my experiences with C-PTSD, how it intersects with Tarot, and, of course, how I used cannabis for it medically). One of the side effects of the abuse I endured and the case of C-PTSD I earned from living through it was an inconvenient pairing: I am a very light sleeper, and I have extremely vivid night terrors.

Night time can be a big ball of suck for me, and when I was taking cannabis if I couldn’t fall asleep I’d just take more and more until I eventually drifted off.

But without it, I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to sleep at all.

When I first decided to quit, I knew I’d be irritable, I knew I’d have a change in sleep habits, and I had no idea what to expect otherwise. I figured it’d be less harsh than the other habits that I had quit before.

In 2010, I quit smoking cigarettes. I had smoked for 20 years, and the habit had escalated to a two pack a day habit. To pull it off, I smoked so much the last two weeks I physically hurt myself, my breaths would only come in short, declarative wheezes. While in the throes of nicotine detoxification, I knit Tom Baker’s iconic scarf from Doctor Who. It was the scarf from the ‘Key to Time’ — one of my favorite stories, and given the adventure I was on, the name was all too apt.

I had quit drinking in 2014, which was tough but mainly for the social aspects of losing nearly all the friends I had because they didn’t feel right asking me to hang out in a bar. Plus, there’s the inconvenient truth that the last thing a drunk person wants to be around is someone sober (and often vice-versa). But I had to quit drinking. I almost died from it, and if I kept doing it I surely would have.

But cannabis? That’s final frontier territory for me. Not only have I been a fierce advocate for cannabis safety, but I’ve been a medical cannabis patient whenever I had access to it. More than smoking cigarettes or drinking, cannabis had become a huge part of who I was and what I wrote about. But unlike drinking, I didn’t feel like cannabis was a threat to my survival — but to my ability to live. The stigma was impacting my ability to get a job.

I had also begun to believe that instead of working through some of the more difficult parts of my traumatized self, I was using cannabis to mask the difficult and uncomfortable feelings that came with sorting through all of that. In other words — it was preventing the very work on myself I now needed to do.

So when I quit, and nearly immediately had my first nightmare — I truly wasn’t ready. Not only had I forgotten how dysregulated my emotions would become after a nightmare, but I also forgot how vivid mine could be. Since then, I’ve literally woken up screaming.

Can you imagine?

Now, you might think, “but Jamie, why even put yourself through such a thing?” well, I’ve also found that other dreams have returned as well.

One night, I dreamt I was attending a symposium at UPMC, my old corporate employer. Everyone there somehow knew who I was even though I hadn’t worked there for years, and it was in a giant auditorium with a stage I could never quite see.I fought several times to get out of the dream by waking up and every time I fell back asleep I’d drop back in, I couldn’t even become lucid. I’d wake up, go back to sleep, and literally drop in from the sky and it would start like the entire thing had been paused. Anyway, I was looking for my friend, let’s call him Larry, which was an impossible task until it wasn’t (you know how dreams are). I somehow knew he had been following me through this massive terrifying crowd all along. A crowd of people who befuddlingly knew me. So to find him, I simply turned around and there he was. I asked him why I was there and he said he wanted to ask me the same question. FINALLY I was let go, and when I woke up it was morning. My phone was ringing, and it was a call from a recruiter about a job…it was for UPMC.

This felt like a re-ignition of another level of my intuition, and it cemented my resolve to continue on this journey and see where it takes me.

After I had these experiences, I started reading about the experiences others have had with vivid dreams following cannabis cessation. I’ve writte about the importance (and mysteriousness) of the endocannabinoid system before, and while I appreciate my experiences in exploring it, I also am appreciating this time in allowing it to reach a different type of balance.

Would I suggest quitting cannabis for every person with C-PTSD? Absolutely not! Will I quit my fierce advocacy for safe, accessible cannabis? Absolutely not!

Do I still believe the decision to quit is the best one for me right now? Absolutely. Because while I have to deal with the bad dreams — I also get the good ones. And for now, I find the vivid worlds where I can gain lucidity and weird worlds that indicate what my subconscious is wrestling with important. So, if you decide to quit cannabis for a long period of time — get ready for some wild dreams.